Many commercial products use the Code 128 encoding algorithm as a standard for establishing one-dimensional barcodes. However, for the requirement of a barcode having higher quantity of data in a limited space, general barcodes based on the Code 128 algorithm have become inadequate.
For example, one-dimensional barcodes are printed on reagent trays and consumable medical devices to provide information required for detection and calculation purposes. In common one-dimensional barcodes, Code 128 based barcodes have the highest information density. In such Code 128 based barcodes, each character consists of “3 bars and 3 spaces”. The sum of the widths of the “3 bars and the 3 spaces” is a width of 11 units. The unit width (i.e. the minimum width of each bar or space) of such barcodes may be different by design, and maximum width of the bar or spaces is 4 times of a minimum width. One character may have, upto, 7-bit of information. For indicating 8-bit data, we have to rearrange all these 8-bit data into several code 128 based characters, resulting in inconvenience in encoding, decoding and operation. Therefore increases the complexity in data management.
Thus, if the Code 128 based barcode would be expanded to indicate every 8-bit data, the information density of the barcode can be increased and the encoding, decoding and the subsequent operation can be simplified.